


the sun to my flowers

by jokerownsmysoul



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: F/M, Mild Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:48:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27827791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokerownsmysoul/pseuds/jokerownsmysoul
Summary: Having an argument with Arthur is very rare, but when it happens sometimes it’s more difficult to clarify than others, even when you don’t even remember why you argued; like this time.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/You
Kudos: 12





	the sun to my flowers

Your mind was so focused on your thoughts that you didn’t even realize Arthur had left the apartment. The only way you could tell was from the noise he made as soon as he closed the door behind him, slamming the chain against the wood worn out by time. You’d stopped talking to him for so long that you couldn’t even remember what you argued about that morning.

Arguments between you were very rare. Arthur loved you with all his being. Although his inexistent experience in love had taught him nothing, he had learned one thing from it, the only thing he actually knew about love: to love with all his being.

He had never thought that one day life would give him the gift of finding love; the first months of your relationship he found unimaginable that you could find comfort in having him by his side. Every time you kissed him or were looking for his contact you always saw the surprise on his face - he was not yet used to the affection you gave him, and which you still keep giving him.

He was clumsy and inexperienced, and he was fully aware of that. But he knew one thing about love, though, and it was the first thing he thought about when he met you. He had fallen in love with you at the exact moment when your eyes mixed with his, and with the time spent together his art of loving had improved, but this certainty has been impressed in his memory and repeated in his mind every day, like a prayer.

I want to keep you with me. 

A simple prayer, few words, but which meant everything that was important to him in your relationship. The moment he saw you, he swore to himself he would never do anything to hurt you, or that would make you cry.

He knew almost nothing about love, but the only thing he knew about love was the only thing that actually mattered: not to hurt the other, to protect the other, to keep the other with him. The pain he had experienced in his whole life had helped him to prevent other people from experiencing the same pain. From a person who has known so much hurt is not expected such a heart full of love and kindness towards others. But Arthur was different from the other inhabitants of Gotham, and every day he woke up with the desire not to make people suffer as he had suffered, which is why he loved his job.

Only those who have experienced pain on their own skin can take care of the pain of others, and he took care of yours.

And that’s why arguments between you two were very rare. Arthur never gave you a reason to argue with him and in the most difficult days he knew what your needs were before you knew it: he would cradle you in his arms and reassure you when you were tired, he would cooke for you and just being with you when you were nervous. 

If you need silence, he sit next to you and look at you, in silence. If you need to hear the noise of the world not to listen to the thoughts in your head, he makes you sit on his lap and tells you his best jokes to make you smile and distract you with the sound of his voice, which for you is the most beautiful melody in the world, until you’re ready to confide in him. Every day his priority is to take care of your pain even when it involves putting aside his own; especially in these moments, actually, he is completely dedicated to your entire existence.

But in a relationship you can also stumble while holding hands and walking together, and that sunday you tripped over a little pebble under your shoe. It was a Sunday morning, you had breakfast together and between a bite and a kiss, between a sip of coffee and a caress, you both understood that your kisses are the best breakfast you could ever want and that having the other one sitting at the same table in front of you every morning, before facing the day, is your greatest blessing.

Then something broke and you stopped working together. You no longer remember the foolishness which you had argued about: a broken glass? A bill still to be paid? Or was it most likely the tiredness you had accumulated during the week which suddenly exploded invading the apartment?

The only thing you could remember was Arthur’s face stretched out, the wrinkles on his forehead turned deeper, his furrowed brow and his face blurred by tears in your eyes that didn’t allow you to look at every wonderful detail in his face, which by now you know better than yours.

You remembered when you stopped talking to him in the sweet, loving tone of your voice with whom you turned only to him; you remembered your desperate screams, the frustration and guilt that you threw at each other through your words. You remembered his voice getting firmer when he answered you, and you also remembered the constant sound of his hands slamming on the door when you locked yourself in the bathroom, the impatience in his cries of pain with which he begged you to let him in.

You only reopened the door when you heard Arthur’s footsteps slowly crawling on the couch, as if his feet were anchored to the ground by chains as heavy as your thoughts. Arthur knew when to step aside, and at that moment, when his knuckles had turned red from slamming them too hard on the door, when he couldn’t even get a hiss from you and your soul was wrapped in a silence which was driving him away from you, he realized that as much as he didn’t want to, he had to let you go and give you the chance to metabolize that argument on your own.

From that moment you had stopped speaking to him, and the apartment was filled with the only noise you heard in your mind: your thoughts, your guilt and the tiredness of the week that weighed on your bones, not even giving you a chance to stand still. You didn’t know why you were still dragging a distance that only hurt you.

Arthur kept to have the inexperience of those who were never loved and in certain arguments did not yet know how to behave to bear you as little pain as possible. Should he have stayed behind the door until you had come out? Or by walking away from you and giving you time to stay with yourself had been helpful? What if your silence never ended and you’d leave him? He felt pushed away from you, from the only person that matters to him, and his insecurity had absorbed him to the point that his attempts to get a smile from you had faded, until there was nothing left between you but the vague memory of a breakfast, made together that morning, but which looked so far away that it seemed to both of you belong to another life, to another reality that was no longer yours.

You locked yourself in and even though you felt Arthur’s presence a few feet away from you, you stopped feeling him. You were both dedicated to your personal tasks and not even with the corner of your eye did you try to look at him, for of how much you felt so far away from him. Until to remind you of his body carrying a weight in that room and of the silence filling the apartment till then had been himself, when you heard him leave the apartment. 

The moment you heard the door slamming against the wall and the chain making a deaf noise you also felt your heart racing in fear that it had come out to pour out an anger caused by you or, even worse, in fear that he had gone away forever. That thought awakened your mind from that sleepy place where it had been all day, you felt a surge of fear and impatience in your body to your soul, while you were wandering in the living room occupying every part of the room that you could reach at a fast pace, trying to soften the anxiety that didn’t allow your heart to stop.

You didn’t know how long it had been since Arthur came out the front door, but the pain you felt at the bottom of both your feet and in your legs for how much you had been walking around the room without ever stopping, suggested that it had been at least half an hour since he had left. Arthur had never left the apartment without first giving you a soft kiss on the lips and saying goodbye; seeing him leave without knowing where he went and when he would return made the guilt eat away your stomach and your mind alert realize how long you’d dragged an argument born of a futile foolishness you couldn’t even remember. You felt your eyes damping with tears when you saw that the love of your life had not yet returned home and you felt a void in the pit of your stomach that you felt every time he wasn’t beside you. Your life wasn’t used to not having him beside you, especially when you didn’t know where he went or, worse, whether he would return or not. Time weighed on your shoulders and with every minute passing in front your eyes you could stand less and less, while you were corroded by the lack of feeling him again on your body desperate of love. Desperate for this man who had never been loved and for whom you thought there was no one in the world who could love a human being as much as you loved him. The love you felt for this man was so in the depth of you that you couldn’t remember your life before you met him, and maybe you didn’t even want to, because you knew it was a life to forget.

Every time you spent loving him was the only time worth remembering.

And at that moment, feeling him far from your body but also from your heart, which that day hadn’t loved him as he deserved because it had allowed you to sink into your weariness, you only wanted him to come home and repair all the pain you had caused to each other, that you caused to him the moment you left him out when you locked yourself in the bathroom. Leaving him out of the room but also out of your heart, which by now, out of anger, was suffering from the same pain as his like always did, craving for his own heart.

You were still deep in thoughts and in your own guilt when Arthur made you realize that he had come back home in the same way he had come out: through the noise the chain made by slamming on the wood of the door.

“Arthur!” You ran to him so fast that you didn’t even give him the time to put down his jacket, as if your bodies were two magnets that can’t stay apart. Maybe they really are. You were standing, a few feet away, in front of the entrance door. Even before you could get closer to him or say anything else you noticed that his face was marked by deep lines highlighted by his wrinkles, his mouth open on the point of telling you something and his eyes wrapped in a mortified gaze fixed on yours. You hadn’t looked him in the eye since just before you locked yourself in the bathroom and to think that in all those hours you ignored him he had that hurt look on his face, buried by a hope which asked you to talk to him again, made you slow down the blood that flowed through your veins. 

“Y/N, I’m sor-“ as he spoke he pulled out a bouquet of blue, yellow and red flowers which he held in his right hand until then, hidden behind his back.

A noise of astonishment came out of your lips, and even before you could see it, your body was coming towards him again. You felt the heat flare up on your red cheeks and your eyes were able to hold back the tears less and less. The rare times you quarreled Arthur tried to get close to you through small things; his favorite is to do his magic trick with the bunch of fake flowers, and only then he would approach you slowly and put them in your hands. How could you possibly resist?

But not this time, no. This time they were real flowers. “Arth-” you said as you felt the weight of your feet wanting to get closer to him to feel him again with all your senses.

“No, Y/N, let me finish, please.” He stopped you again as you tried to approach him by stretching out his left arm and the palm of his hand flat open towards you, then with the same hand he rubbed his face to settle the rebel strand of hair which always fell on his forehead in a shaken gesture. You knew that the nature of this gesture was frustration and that it was one of the many nervous ticks his body used to catch its breath when Arthur couldn’t do it on his own and felt uncomfortable. “I can’t stand to fight with you even for a second, Y/N. I… The fake flowers weren’t enough this time, and… I had to do something. Just something. I had to make it up to you and now I have these flowers for you in my hand and… and they’re alive. Can you forgive me? It’s just-.” He said those words by constantly rubbing his face in shaken and hasty moves, his body wrapped in imperceptible nervous shiver, but which you noticed.

Until you tried to approach him again, and this time you wouldn’t have stopped yourself even if he tried to do it again. He didn’t, and as you reached his trembling and nervous body as he spoke words too quickly for you to understand him, you took his left hand, with which he kept to rub his face and brought out all the agitation he wanted to vent through his nervous tick, and held it in yours to let your touch calm him down, lingering a light kiss on the back where the swollen veins were clearly visible. You felt Arthur’s hand relaxing under the touch of your lips and his body stopped shaking when he felt the warmth of your skin on his fingers. “Oh, Artie. You didn’t have to go out just to buy me flowers, baby. I’m sorry for the way I turned my back on you today. And you? Can you forgive me?" 

"I… I had to do it. We argued because of me. Every flower in this world bloom for you and I always give you the fake ones and it’s not fair. But Angel, you are the sun for every flower on this earth, just as you are for me. You never have to ask me to forgive you, my heart forgives you already a second after we argue.”

Your fingers were dancing with each other as Arthur was desperately in search of your touch. "They’re beautiful, Arthur, just like you. They have the same colors as you. I forgive you, love. Of course I do.” Arthur smiled and without giving you time to grab the flowers in a second he was already with his lips on yours, kissing you with such an intensity that made you realize how much he missed you during those hours when in the apartment you both seemed to occupy it only by yourselves. With his left hand on your cheek and his right hand behind your back with which he still held the flowers, he pushed your body firmly into his to feel your contact as much as possible. You were so tight that in the kiss a moan came out from your lips which made him smile. 

When you broke the kiss to catch your breath you place your forehead against his, closing your eyes and smelling the unmistakable scent which enveloped his whole body. The smell of cigarettes and fabric softener on his clothes never erased the sweet but intense scent of his skin; actually this sea of distinct aromas created just one and the only one on earth, it was only his and you would have recognized it among a thousand. 

“Arthur?” You asked him still with shortness of breath for that kiss, that had mixed with his.

“Yes, love?” He stroked your hair with the hand he was still holding your cheek with in a care-giving motion. “These flowers are great, but I’m gonna miss your Carnival fake flowers today.” You said in a light laugh and from the folds you felt deepening through your forehead against his you understood that he was smiling too. “I have them too, darling.”

You opened your eyes to look at him and you noticed his knowing smile, and by wrapping his face with both your hands you pushed him to open his eyes too and caressed his soft cheeks for a long time, a shy smile drew his face. “You can’t imagine how much I love you, Arthur” came out of your lips before you knew it, as you looked at the man of your life before you, not being able to understand what you had done so precious to deserve his love. "I don’t need to imagine it. I already feel it, angel.” As if he wanted to prove to you the truth of what he had just said he kissed you again and placed the flowers on the table next to the entrance door without ever leaving your lips, so he could hold you even tighter and better while he made sure that all the lack of caresses you both had on that day would restore and your bodies would return home: to the other.

How a man who had never been loved could love in such an intense way you never knew and perhaps it was not necessary. You just had to feel it.


End file.
